How Many Jobs Has Pfizer Cut This Year?

When the Pfizer-Wyeth deal was announced earlier this year, Pfizer said it would cut about 15% of the combined companies’ work-force — just under 20,000 jobs. That figure included 8,000 jobs that Pfizer had already said it planned to cut.

When we checked in with Pfizer last week, after the deal closed, a spokesman told us those cuts had already begun on the Pfizer side — but didn’t tell us how many jobs had been eliminated so far.

The company says its workforce was 75,400 at the end of the third quarter. Pfizer employed about 81,900 people at the end of last year.

That suggests the company has cut 6,500 jobs this year. That’s on top of thousands of jobs the company eliminated in 2008. Those are sobering numbers, but the company’s previous statements suggest more reductions are still to come.

In part because of the cuts, Pfizer reported higher profits compared with the year-earlier period, even as revenue declined. Here’s a full earnings story.

Comments (5 of 9)

As a vendor to the (Wyeth) Pfiizer facility in Chazy NY, the closing of this facility will leave hundreds of good hard-working folks and their families with NOTHING. Chazy is in a remote area of extreme northern NY State, with not much else in the way for a decent job prospect.

Greed and "not enough profit" is, and has been the driving force in the world of Wall Street.

It's a shame, it's not right...

Steven Green

4:35 am October 26, 2009

subrahmanya wrote :

internet has literally destroyed
old marketing
structures
of pharma companies

7:28 pm October 22, 2009

PYL wrote :

By any measure, this merger was the result of misguided financial calculus. Neither Pfizer nor Wyeth has much of a pipeline -- and certainly nothing that can offset of the patent expiry of Lipitor. What really boggles the imagination, however, is how a company with such an extraordinary balance sheet must continually resort to such desperate measures. I'm only sorry that so many good people will once again lose their livelihood at the alter not of greed but rather stupidity. Running Pfizer in the glory days of Lipitor, Novasc, Viagra, Diflucan, and Zocor was liking coaching the Chicago Bulls during the Michael Jordan era. But those days are long gone and they ain't coming back

12:49 pm October 22, 2009

fomerly Pfizer wrote :

I worked in Pfizer's New London office until June 2008. It was, indeed, a ghost town. More like a morgue, really. Cold, quiet, morbid.

12:28 pm October 20, 2009

Representative wrote :

I just left Pfizer. The corporate climate is poor and promotions are scarce. It's not the same company I started with. I know a lot of people who are just hanging on until they can retire. The CEO is a master at cutting headcount, but it is really angering the customers. I will be very interested to see where the company is in two years.